AuthorTopic: Need some advice about a particular style  (Read 3213 times)

Offline DIYmeat

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Need some advice about a particular style

on: June 10, 2015, 11:26:50 am


This is the first pixel artwork I've created so I'm still very green. I'm not entirely sure what advice I need so I won't try to preempt you but I will say you can ignore the feet as I haven't bothered to detail them.

When I started I wanted to recreate, or at least borrow from, Seiken Densetsu 3 style of character art. Most online tutorials seem to discuss the subtle tiling of the environments but I haven't really found anywhere discussing the quite contrasted and heavily highlighted character art:





I think I've had some moderate success in the hair but whenever I tried to use the method of highlighting seen in the SD3 artwork I really struggled to stop the brighter areas from sticking out too much. I ended up doing something quite different with the highlights as you can see.
« Last Edit: June 10, 2015, 11:34:08 am by DIYmeat »

Offline DIYmeat

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Re: Need some advice about a particular style

Reply #1 on: June 11, 2015, 06:18:12 pm
Bump.

Any advice is welcome.

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: Need some advice about a particular style

Reply #2 on: June 11, 2015, 06:45:56 pm
just look at your ref

the ref uses 16 colors, the brightest yello is used everywhere in the sprite
the reference has a solid "black" outline (actually it's not balack but a very dark value)
the reference uses a completely different body proportionset (if you want to copy the style to 100% you also need to copy that)
"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."

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Offline Decroded

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Re: Need some advice about a particular style

Reply #3 on: June 11, 2015, 09:51:28 pm
Basically in that style draw everyone as if they are 5 years old.
head is bigger limbs r shorter etc.
exaggerate size of features like eyes, hair, weapons etc.

as cyangmou mentioned the brightest colour is shared as the highlight across all 4 ramps. the idea is to bring harmony across the sprite and create a strong consistent mood light.
I haven't checked but you might find this color is used on other hero sprites too to bring harmony to their variation.

Offline Tourist

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Re: Need some advice about a particular style

Reply #4 on: June 13, 2015, 12:26:07 am
I poked at the reference images a bit. 

The color ramps look rather basic.  Five bits for each RGB channel, SNES hardware limit.  One common light and one common dark color.  Three ramps of three additional colors, one ramp of four additional colors.  Some of the ramps are simple linear changes in RGB space, some are not, but most look like a linear pattern that was then tweaked by hand.  Ramps are separate, no reuse of colors other than the light end point.

Use of colors in the sprites is pretty straightforward.  Sketch the sprite, draw in a shadow line.  Any pixel in shadow gets a color, all the pixels on the light side are the lightest color.  Outline with the dark.  The end result is the overexposed look.


A bit more detail:
The color channels are all clamped between 16 and 248.  That's a bit odd, I would have thought they get clamped between 16 and 240 per the YUV color space.  More likely these sprites are just a rip from the original game, so I'm not sure if this should be clamped or scaled.

The sprites were also made to output to a CRT display, not an LCD.  There was a thread in the general discussion area from a while ago about CRT emulation that goes over some of the differences.  I remember digging through the MAME source code to see how they had done it.  I think they used a small blur followed by spectral sharpening.  The result was that colors would bleed a bit into the adjacent pixels and then get hue shifted towards one the RGB axes.  This effect was stronger in the light pixels than the darker ones.  The final result was overall darker as well.  My memory is a bit fuzzy.

If you wanted to create a sprite that looks like the ones posted, just reduce your palette to 16 colors, using the upper 5 bits per channel (each R,G, and B should be divisible by 8 ).  If you wanted something that looks like how it actually looked on the screen you'd need to hit the sprite with a filter of some sort afterward.  User Ai might know if there's a plugin for Graphics Gale that already does this.


The witch sprite in the OP:

I like the hair.

Something in your process or tools is generating an enormous number of colors (116).  That's going to make it difficult to edit.

The sprite looks like she has a broken upper arm just where the shoulder and glove meet.

I think I've seen the hat before on another sprite.  Same angle too.  Come to think of it, I think I've seen this same sprite design before.  Blue hair, dark purple witch outfit.  But it was a younger look to the character.  Did you post this a while ago under a different user name?  Or is there just some common reference that I'm missing?  Doesn't really matter, just curious.

Good luck with your sprite,
Tourist

Edit: removed unexpected smiley
« Last Edit: June 13, 2015, 01:38:21 pm by Tourist »

Offline pistachio

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Re: Need some advice about a particular style

Reply #5 on: June 13, 2015, 07:28:38 am
^

What that looks like.


SS3 classes sprites have these dynamic comic book poses.
This sprite doesn't have that going for it, almost looks like a stock photo ref, so I put in more angles to compensate.

Used colors from various sprite rips/screenshots.
Exaggerated some stuff and added others.
Put in stuff that alters the silhouette, w/ fits in more with the original sprites.
She's basically the witch from dragon's crown now :D but it gives the sprite some needed character.

Not sure if the colorspace or the tech specs are 100% accurate, this could be fixed, but the point more or less is to look real, to be a style guide.
« Last Edit: June 13, 2015, 08:51:22 am by pistachio »